--- title: Who is the Saturday Fraud Strategist, with Hailey Windham source_page: https://www.sardine.ai/media/the-saturday-fraud-strategist/episodes/fraud-strategy canonical: https://www.sardine.ai/media/the-saturday-fraud-strategist/episodes/fraud-strategy format: text/markdown date: 2026-09-26T04:01:00.000Z description: Fraud strategy is a mindset: accept you can't outpredict fraudsters, and build a team ready to react fast and clearly. --- **Quick links:** [Human page](https://www.sardine.ai/media/the-saturday-fraud-strategist/episodes/fraud-strategy) · [Home](https://www.sardine.ai) · [Customers](https://www.sardine.ai/customers) · [Blog](https://www.sardine.ai/blog) · [Demo](https://www.sardine.ai/demo) --- # Who is the Saturday Fraud Strategist, with Hailey Windham **Published:** 2026-09-26T04:01:00.000Z Fraud strategy is a mindset: accept you can't outpredict fraudsters, and build a team ready to react fast and clearly. I handed my microphone over to Hailey Windham, host of Fraud Forward. For once, I'm the one answering the questions instead of asking them. Hailey opens by asking how I'd describe my mission today, since "builder" doesn't quite cover what I do anymore between advising, educating, and writing. That question sets up the real spine of this conversation. What fraud strategy actually means, why I think predictive fraud analytics is mostly a fabrication, and how a fraud strategist's real job is making sure a team can react well when things break, not pretending anyone can stay ahead of fraudsters. Hailey and I talk about where healthy skepticism turns into a blind spot, why foundation models are proving more valuable for enriching data than for scoring transactions, and I close out with real advice for anyone quietly wondering whether they could go independent themselves. ### Episode notes & key takeaways Fraud strategy is a mindset, not a job title Hailey asked me directly what being a fraud strategist actually means, and I think the honest answer is that it's less a function and more a mindset. Strategy means thinking about long-term goals and effects rather than tactics. If your day-to-day is consumed by putting out fires, you're operating tactically by definition, and only stepping back from that lets you actually be strategic. Predictive fraud analytics is mostly a fabrication I said something on this episode I've believed for a while but rarely say this bluntly. Predictive fraud analytics is a fab. Teams that think they'll get ahead of fraudsters are chasing something that never happens. You're lucky to be two steps behind instead of ten. If we can't be predictive, the real value of fraud strategy is building the capacity to react to fraud effectively and efficiently when it happens, not pretending we saw it coming. Two stories about skepticism, and where it becomes a blind spot I told Hailey about the most expensive mistake of my career, refusing to believe a simplified model had actually outperformed our proprietary one, which delayed shipping it by a full year. I also told her about walking into Sardine's foundation model research already convinced it was hype, and having to consciously remind myself not to repeat the same mistake twice. Healthy skepticism is a real guardrail for fraud fighters. The line between that and stubbornness is genuinely blurry, and I don't think there's a clean rule for where it sits. Foundation models earn their value in a different place than most people expect Something I only fully understood in the last couple of months is that foundation models aren't proving their worth in scoring transactions, they're proving it in enriching data and creating new features. That's a real shift from how I thought about them even recently, and it's exactly the kind of assumption I want fraud teams to keep testing rather than treating as settled. Why so many fraud teams build things they should just buy I told Hailey I see this constantly, especially in fintech, teams rebuilding a rule engine, a device ID system, or a KYC process from scratch because their internal ethos is "we're technologists, we build things." Most of the time, that decision costs a two-year detour disguised as a one-month project. Fraud technology build vs buy is a real decision, and defaulting to build almost never serves the team well. Protecting attention and deep work is harder than it sounds I'm historically bad at delegating, especially anything related to building, and I told Hailey that directly. Once I joined Sardine and found myself running two full content engines plus writing a book, I realized I'd slipped back into founder-mode context switching, and that constant narrative shifting quietly erodes how well you think, especially when you're also leaning on AI and giving it too much leash without noticing. Real advice for anyone thinking about going independent Hailey asked me what I'd tell someone quietly considering consulting or advisory work, and I gave her the two things I actually believe matter. First, understand that going independent means you're now a business owner first, handling sales, marketing, and admin, before you ever get to do the work you're actually good at. Second, build attention deliberately, either by reaching out to your network with zero ask attached, just checking how you can help, or by putting out content consistently, so that when someone needs what you do, your name is the one that comes to mind. ### Final takeaway If there's one idea from this conversation I hope sticks, it's that fraud strategy was never about outsmarting the future. It's about building a team, and a mindset, that can react to whatever actually happens with speed and clarity instead of panic. That applies whether you're running a fraud program, evaluating a new piece of technology, or deciding whether you're ready to build a career on your own name instead of someone else's team. None of it happens by prediction. It happens by being ready. Resources & links Not ready to stop the conversation about my, and hopefully your, favorite subject? Subscribe to The Saturday Fraud Strategist newsletter. Connect with Hailey Windham | LinkedIn Host of Fraud Forward Community Banking Lead at Sardine Connect with Chen Zamir | LinkedIn Host of The Saturday Fraud Strategist Helping fintechs build smarter fraud defenses Co-author of “The Fraud Fighter’s AI Playbook”